Lots of games get bad translations in and out of their native language. The ghosts of tsushima menu that went up recently kind of has me convinced my initial fear was correct, that the game will be a “isn't Japan cool” game from a negative perspective. Kawaiikochans did a fun comic about it:
Wow. You'd think Sony has someone who could review that and explain that it is bad! Well, in fact, we know Sony has many dozens of people who can do this. Somehow, they were not given the opportunity to do so (at least, not in a way that could effect change!)
my guess is somebody at the office once lied about speaking Japanese, and then later they were like “we don't need a translator for this, X speaks Japanese”, and then X googled it instead of admitting they lied
oh man i've been playing this unlicensed gameboy color fire emblem-like game called pokemon saphire (sic) edition and it has so many good ones. all of the pokemon names are translated, literally, from japanese to chinese to english. forgive the camera shots, these are straight off of my RG350M.
What‘s really weird about this is that, as far as I know, Japanese players/Twitter users aren’t discussing this. It‘s not like they’re completely blind to what happens within English-speaking Twitter; Japanese fans have quite a few opinions on the Japanese translation of Sekiro, for example. This, by contrast, doesn‘t seem to be registering at all. I’ve searched a few phrases and nothing really came up. Even news sites aren't reporting on it. If I had to guess, this is the sort of thing that‘ll become a huge meme Japan-side once the game actually releases (assuming Sony doesn’t fix the translation, that is).
[And just like that](https://automaton-media.com/articles/newsjp/20200702-129337/), Tsushima's making its way into the Japanese Twitter sphere.
i don‘t know if this is necessarily a bad translation, but it’s similar to the sekiro example posted above so i'm posting it anyway
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i always thought that this sentence structure and the resulting punchline was really funny because of how unnatural it felt, but as i learned more about how sentences are structured in japanese, i guess it makes sense? turns out localizing things is real hard!
this isn't game related but the most absurd translation i think about constantly is from the Moomin books. in swedish, a pair of characters is called Tofslan and Vifslan, which is a very overt reference to the author Tove Jansson and her girlfriend at the time Vivica. however, these characters are named Thingumy and Bob in english??? maybe this was in an effort to tone down any potential homosexuality for the american audiences? who knows, it just sucks lol
This is a fairly minor one, but I think about it a lot. I just finished replaying Resident Evil 4, and I‘ve always wondered about this cutscene where Leon says “No thanks, bro!” in response to Salazar’s monologue introducing himself as the lord of the castle, in which he does not appear to offer anything for Leon to reject. I always wondered how this exchange is worded in the Japanese script. Is Leon rejecting the welcome? The notion that he and Salazar are kindred spirits?
There's a lot of this in arcade games. The King of Fighters victory screen text and Aero Fighters 2 comes to mind, but I think my personal favorite is this boss warning text from DonPachi.
The Japanese version of the recent Panzer Dragoon remake was similarly nonsensical—it may have been fixed post-patch, I haven't checked.
WayForward's notorious for google-tier localization, they've given the ol' "we're as disappointed as you, we'll be working with new translators going forward" statement a few times but it's a constant problem. It would even happen with the Japanese versions of their games back when they had to go through a Japanese publisher, and I have no idea how anyone okayed them.
One of my favorite examples is this Nazi calling you a “nerd” in Bionic Commando.
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The Japanese text literally means "stinky guy," which isn't much better, but "nerd" is just so hilariously mild.
Bonus: Not a translation issue, per se, but I always thought this reading of "That's it! That's the spirit!" in Mega Man Legends sounded like the actor had never heard the expression "that's the spirit" and didn't understand what it meant. ↓
https://youtu.be/XRhKnbhuBEM?t=1295
I don‘t want to beat a dead horse or anything, but I was thinking a lot about Persona 5’s translation recently after the new Royal version came out. Do most players of this game even notice how clunky the dialogue is? It's not like this in P4 (90% of the time). In Persona 5 every other scene reads like this.
Sorry if this is the wrong thread for this. None of these are total gaffs or examples of comically misunderstood source material. You can tell what the intended meaning is. These read more like text written by someone who spent all day thinking in a foreign language and then wasn't able to come up with more graceful English phrasings. But like, this was years in the making! What happened?!
@captain#2819 These kinda look like what I would write in a first pass at a translation like “man i‘m Sure there is a better way to say this but i can not think of it right now so i’ll just translate all the words and come back later”
yeah, it‘s needlessly complex - this stuff looks like “translation” vs “naturalization” - they didn’t want to change anything, so they almost tried to keep japanese syntax as much as possible and wound up with something clunky as heck. I didn't make it very far into P5 because I was annoyed, so… honk.